This case study examines the consequences of community language attitudes and ideologies on later-generation heritage speakers through qualitative sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of 22 interviews with first- and second-generation Latinos of diverse backgrounds in a major US metropolitan area. The findings show that imposed deficit identities derived from ideologies of language purity, proficiency, and individual agency were misunderstood and stigmatized later-generation heritage speakers, leading to language insecurity and avoidance despite overtly positive attitudes toward Spanish maintenance. Results demonstrate the resilience of prescriptive/purist language attitudes and the tension inherent between these beliefs (albeit couched within positive heritage language attitudes) and speakers’ actual bilingualism. Further, they show that the ideologies of individual agency can paradoxically contribute to the imposition of deficit sociolinguistic identities on later-generation speakers and curtail their language use. The study renders visible connections between ideologies of language, identity, and agency and demonstrates how their reproduction within families and communities circumscribes later-generation heritage speakers’ linguistic identities and behavior.
Diaspora offers a fruitful and narrower approach to language and mobility than the study of globalization. By making the historical footprint of mobility evident, diaspora allows analysts to identify the tension between ideologies of language and ethnonational belonging, and patterns of mobility that destabilize them. This special issue features a series of case studies of that tension and its linguistic manifestations, and adds empirical evidence to the nuances and histories within diversity and mobility that concepts such as "globalization" and "superdiversity" can obscure. Further, the notion of diaspora has not been explored with the same rigor in linguistics as it has in other fields. Sociolinguistics stands to benefit from integrating a more nuanced understanding of diaspora into our key questions and assumptions in order to advance the field's critical capacity to respond to complexity. Diaspora sociolinguistics is able to trace and discuss those social processes that are crucial to shaping linguistic repertoires and linguistic behaviortransnationalism, racialization, negotiation of gender and class dynamics, generational differences, and more-with empirical detail and historical embedding. Increased theorization will contribute to new and perennial guiding questions in the field and allow sociolinguists to define the questions we ask about language in diaspora with rigor.
Code switching
describes, essentially, bi‐ and multilingual speakers' use of more than one language or language variety within a single interaction or conversational turn. It is important to highlight that the term code switching is also used for bi‐ and multidialectal speakers' switching between language varieties, such as African American English or World Englishes and so‐called standard varieties.
Pragmatics
, according to Yule's definition, “is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). It has, consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves.”
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